The Associated Press

WEST POINT, Ky. - State officials continued investigating what killed thousands of fish in the Salt River near Fort Knox.

The dead fish, including drum, buffalo, sunfish, paddlefish and sauger, were reported to West Point police Friday afternoon.

On Saturday, officials said dead fish were also located about one mile up the Rolling Fork River which runs into the Salt River.

"We're having trouble locating all the fish," Wayne Davis, the environmental section chief for the state's Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, said Saturday. "They're starting to sink because they've been dead for so long. They started dying at least three days ago."

Davis said officials have not found a cause to the deaths, but the kill comes less than a week after a fire at a nearby bourbon warehouse.

The blaze destroyed a Jim Beam distillery warehouse in Bardstown on Monday. The warehouse contained about 800,000 gallons of bourbon, and some may have flowed into a creek that eventually merges with the Rolling Fork.

Davis said they did not have information linking the two incidents, but said it was a possibility.

In 2000, a fire at the Wild Turkey distillery in Lawrenceburg destroyed a seven-story warehouse, spilling about 1 million gallons of aging bourbon into the Kentucky River.

Biologists believe microscopic bacteria and algae feeding on the sugar in the alcohol sucked the oxygen out of the river, killing thousands of fish, weighing about 80,000 pounds.